stay where you are

Ahem. You watching, Alek?

(This is from the final portland show. I'm swiping it from Youtube.)

Best Song Ever.

I'm glad they played it live on at least one show of the farewell tour - and it looks liek they played it in Philly too...

Julianne Shepherd gives one of the better S-K career restrospectives I've seen in the last few weeks:

Though onstage banter was rare that last day at the Crystal Ballroom, Carrie Brownstein punctuated their final show by telling the audience, "It's such a privilege to play for you tonight." Time will tell the impact and longevity, but for over a decade, the privilege was ours.

Who Protects Us From You pt 2

On the corner of Tillary Street and the Flatbush Avenue Extension, there's a building surrounded by police barricades. I walk past it every day on my way over the bridge on my long trek from Sunset Park to Manhattan, one of the few things that's kept me sane over the last year. Today I looked at the barriers and noticed that they all had "New York Stock Exchange" written on them.

"Wow," I though to myself. "This would make a good photograph and dramatize the linkages between finance capital and the hopeland security state." So I whipped out my cell phone and took a picture, but it came out bad, so I hit "discard."

Suddenly I heard shouting. A police officer - usually stationed near the barricades, had jumped out of his NYPDgolfmobile and was screaming at me.

"Did you just take a picture? Did you take a picture of the barricade?"

I was stunned. I knew that the NYPD had been attempting to ban photography in the subways (unsucessfully,) but we weren't in the subway and there was no way anything i was doing should have been grounds for suspicion - leaving aside whether or not what the cop did was legal.

The officer demanded to see my picture and to know why I took it. I should have said "what gives you the right to ask," or demanded to see his badge number or something, but instead i basically went limp and complied and then he walked away and i turned towards the bridge and walked away, anger and frustration and a feeling of violation seeping into my thoughts and manifesting themselves in a panicked fury and overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Walking over the bridge and staring out at the city, I wanted to throw my umrella over the fence, or smash it and then throw it over, or scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to go back to the cop and yell at him - calll him a fascist, whatever.

But instead i kept walking, and seethed, and stared at my cellular phone, which now apparently doubles as a weapon of mass destruction.

Would he have let me go if I weren't a middle class white man?

amnesia

I've been having trouble remembering things today.

The name of a friend's girfriend.

That Yale prof who tried to have someone expelled a feew years ago for union activity.

faces to match the names of the namedropped in sanitized fast food burrito stations.

I think i'm getting old.

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assorted labor news.

I haven't posted anything about the Unite-HERE hotel campaign in a while, so i will link to this SF Chronicle article on the possibility of another strike - the first since the 2004 lockout ended.

The strike authorization is almost a given. But no labor action is imminent, said Mike Casey, president of Local 2 of the hotel workers' union, Unite Here. Instead, the union wants to reach a contract agreement by Labor Day, Casey said Wednesday.

"That is our hope. I don't know if we are going to get it done or not,'' Casey said. "If we don't, there is going to be a train wreck.''

Also, the janitors at the University of Miami approve a contract!

good things

whoa

Sorry Somehow/Too Far Down

I've been a shitty blogger this summer. You can chalk this up to the month writing in my apt with no internet access, the months since of torturing myself with procrastination and burnout and getting nothing done, and the gnawing feeling that I should be doing other things with my time than writing here. Like writing papers. And then there's my frustrated conviction that the stuff I write here - and everywhere else, for that matter, just isn't very good, and I need to figure out how to do work in grad school that i actually like doing and am excited about and feel like I'm doing reasonably well if I actually want to stay here. Which, well...

And then there are the several long posts I've written but then deemed to controversial or ad hominem (my burnout-fueled post about GSOC from July and my now-complete reworking of Allen Ginsberg's "America" into "American Studies" -- excerpt below)

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our intellectual commitments be run by Catharine Stimpson?
I'm obsessed by Catharine Stimpson.
I make up songs about her.
She stares at me every time I see her on the street.
She tried to shake my hand by the picket line.
She's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are responsible. Career administrators are responsible. Everybody's responsible but me.
It occurs to me that I am American Studies.
I am talking to myself again.

or that no one would actually want to read them -- my belated happy 4th birthday post to the Yale Undergraduate Organizing Committee, which was also going to be my belated happy birthday post to phoebe, who, strangely enough, shares a birthday with the UOC -- and these just all end up in the saved drafts bin for all eternity.

So to all the folks who've been reading and wanting more than I have here provided i apologize. This blog has sucked. At some point, in between the work that needs to get done and the organizing and union stuff, maybe it will suck less someday soon.

My weekend was unproductive but enoyable. Sunday afternoon was a parade of run-ins with Yale folks -like ZP- on the street. I hung out with Abbey for only the second time in two and a half years -- glad she's in NY. Met Abbey's sister and her brother in law, which was cool, ran into someone i went to grade school with in a fast food burrito restaurant ("how are you?" "Fine, was on strike for six months, have two incompletes and go through extended periods of self doubt. You?") And then the really ridiculous(ly awesome) moment came when i was standing on University Place on the phone with Erin and then JL randomly walked by. It was a day that made NY feel a little less soul-destroying and atomizing, and you can't really have too many of those.

In any event, I need to get my shit together.

Oh. That CGEU conference was pretty useful too.

The Other Joseph Hill, RIP

The lead singer of the seminal roots reggae band Culture passed away on Saturday. That's him on the right.

Culture was one of the most important and political Jamaican reggae bands of the mid-late 1970s. Hill's lyrics were fiery and prophetic and visionary, and he'll be missed.

And while we're on the subject of NYT articles,

There's a piece in the Fashion & Style section on tensions within Lesbian communities over how to accept (or whether to accept) transmen.

My question, I guess, is what it's doing in the Fashion & Style section. There's something either very radical or very problematic about talking about gender as fashion. Vulgar performativity theory sans any consideration of violence and power, maybe. I'll shut up now.

Is this really a "victory?"

The department wants to require permits for groups of 10 or more bicyclists
or pedestrians — instead of 2 — who plan to travel more than two city blocks
without complying with traffic laws, officials said.

"A Local Action"

Wanna see an awesome video of last weekend's action by graduate employees and hotel workers at the hyatt regency penn's landing? (Yes, of course you do.) Click here. I'm the dude in the pixies shirt.

From Yale to Jail

Last year, GESO released a report called "Endowing Injustice," which examined the links between Yale's endowment, and, through the Hedge Fund Farallon Capital Management LLC, the private prison conglomerate CCA. This was not the first such link made between the neoliberal university and the prison economy by social justice activists -- the Sodexho divestment campaigns preceeded it by several years. Yet it is of singular importance in that it establishes a fairly direct link between the university's development plan and the privatized carceral archipelago which has become an increasingly prominent feature of the landscape of global capitalism and attendant divisions of labor and constructions of 'race.' (Apologies for the scare quotes. Paul Gilroy on the brain.)

Today's NYT offers another another such thread between the global university and the neoliberal iteration of what we used to call the prison-industrial complex (PIC,) the use of prisoners as test subjects for pharmaceutical products often created and patented by university researchers. Is this the newest frontier in the post-Bayh-Dole restructuring of the university's priorities? Is this where all that NIH money goes?

Even with current regulations, oversight of such research has been difficult. In
2000, several universities were reprimanded for using federal money and
conducting several hundred projects on prisoners without fully reporting the
projects to the appropriate authorities.

How does the academic labor movement respond to and intervene in this linkage?

I'm posting a link to Dan Berger and Andy Cornell's reportback from their summer book tour for Berger's Outlaws of America and the Letters From Young Activists anthology (coedited by Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow and featuring letters from Andy and half the people i went to college with.) Berger and Cornell share some useful and insightful -and occasionally provocative - observations and commentary on the state of U.S. movements for social justice which I urge whatever readership i have to take a look at.

"The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: 'Fucking Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.' Gibson then asked the deputy, 'Are you a Jew?'"

But don't worry, Abe Foxman forgives him.

I Still Wanna Be Yr Carrie Brownstein.

Stay Where You Are

Also, this, while from 1997 and therefore not from last night, may pique the interest of at least one reader of this blog.

I Wanna Be Yr Carrie Brownstein

I saw my favorite band on the planet for the last time yesterday. It was intense and amazing and beautiful and I'm really glad I was there.

Now Is The Time To Invent

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